Career

Reporter for the
Cleveland Plain Dealer, Newark Star-Ledger
, and
People
; senior editor for
Essence;
author of novels, including
Good Hair
, 1996,
The Itch
, 1998,
Acting Out
, 2003, and
Who Does She Think She Is?
, 2005.

Awards:
Ten best books of 1996,
Los Angeles Times
, for
Good Hair
; best new author, Go On Girl Book Club.

Sidelights

Benilde Little, a former journalist, achieved success as a novelist with
her sharp observations of class distinctions among African Americans. When
her first novel,
Good Hair
, was published in 1996, critics described her as part of a literary wave
of black female novelists forsaking tales of slavery and poverty to write
about the black middle class and upper class. When that same wave of
writers began to be pigeonholed as "black chick lit" in the
2000s, Little, in her mid-40s, expanded her range, combining the usual
"chick lit" preoccupation with men and dating with a
portrayal of generational differences in African-American families.

Little was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. Her parents were an auto
worker and a nurse's aide, placing the family on the cusp between
the working class and the middle class, but her parents tried hard to
elevate their children into middle-class life through education and a
stable home. In one interview, Little described watching her Newark
neighborhood change as white families left and poorer black families moved
in. The new kids at her school, less well-off than her, disdained her
middle-class wardrobe and home.

That made Little conscious from an early age of how class differences can
divide African Americans, an idea that was cemented in her mind when she
attended the historically black Howard University, which has long educated
much of America's black elite. Fellow students would ask her what
her father and grandfather did for a living or what car her father drove.
"I don't come from a really rich background or anything,
" she told Etelka Lehoczky of the
Chicago Tribune.
"I went to college and saw people who had a lot of stuff, and was
kind of like, 'Oh, my God.' I thought we were privileged,
and then I got to college and it was like, 'No, we're
not.'"

Little attended graduate school at Northwestern University and worked as a
newspaper reporter for the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
and
Newark Star-Ledger.

She also reported for
People
, then became an editor for the black women's magazine
Essence.
Meanwhile, she wanted to write a novel. But, in the late 1980s, she was
told that she had to write about slavery or the ghetto to succeed as a
black female writer. Fortunately for her, she ignored that advice. But she
kept her work on her first novel secret from her colleagues at
Essence.

At the magazine, she had the job of editing book reviews, and advance
copies of books without the slick covers constantly came across her desk.
"That was really the key, " she told Lehoczky in the
Chicago Tribune.
"At
People
, I did a lot of author interviews, but I'd see the finished book,
and I'd [think] 'Wow, this person's a genius. I
can't do this, '" she says. "But when I was
looking at manuscripts, it was like, 'Hey, I can do this. I can do
this.' It was like the little engine that could."

Good Hair
, Little's first novel, published in 1996, told the story of a
newspaper reporter from a working-class background (not too different from
Little herself) and her romance with a Harvard-educated doctor, exploring
the class differences between African Americans along the way. Reviews
were good to fair, and the subject matter generated a lot of buzz. Andrea
M. Wren, writing for the
Washington Post
, gave the book a mixed review, complaining that the main character was
not as self-aware as she claimed to be and that some parts of the plot
were predictable, but called it a "respectable novel about
male-female relationships and the black bourgeoisie." A
Los Angeles Times
writer celebrated the seeming novelty that
Good Hair
was a black comedy of manners, that is, a study of upper-class habits and
preoccupations. That aspect of the book seemed to come directly from
Little's own experiences. Dwight Garner, a writer for Salon.com,
was struck by a scene near the beginning of the novel: a party in
Manhattan full of black professionals who are not actually having a good
time because they are engaged in a sort of game Little calls "Negro
Geography." She defines it as a series of tests of social status
through questions such as where someone went to school, who they knew, and
what they did for a living. Many black professionals, Little explains, try
to distance themselves from white people's stereotypes of
lower-class blacks.

One of the male characters in
Good Hair
even classified black women into three categories, Garner explained,
quoting the book: the "commoner, " or "women with
names like LaQwanda, who wore lycra regardless of dress size"; the
BAP, or black princesses, well-off and well-educated; and Afrotiques, or
"righteous womanist sisters with natural hair and clothes made from
natural fabric." Also, some of the Negro Geography tests are about
looks, Little explains in the book, including shades of skin color and
hair styles. Even the title of the book is a reference to such
distinctions: "good hair, " to snobs in black professional
circles, is straight or wavy, not too kinky.

Critics heralded Little as part of a new generation of African-American
female writers, flourishing after the success of Terry McMillan and her
1992 novel
Waiting to Exhale.
These writers, critics such as Salon.com's Garner said, create
simple, snappy stories about middle-class black women, in contrast with
older, more political writers of weighty literary novels, such as Toni
Morrison and Alice Walker. Garner declared that fans of the two camps were
playing their own version of Negro Geography, feuding over status.

The Itch
, Little's second novel, followed two women as they try to start a
movie production company and suffer through bad luck with the opposite
sex. Again, the new novel examined, as
Washington Post
profiler Pamela Newkirk put it, the ways "successful blacks
straddle two worlds and the price they pay to achieve the American
Dream." Newkirk's profile took great interest in
Little's ideas about class divides and the author's own
status markers, noting that Little owned mink coats and expensive jewelry,
yet her home in a suburb of New York City was full of simple,
unpretentious decor.

It took five years for Little to publish her third novel, an absence she
addressed on her website. Helping out at her daughter's cooperative
school, finding a new house, and getting pregnant with her second child
and being a full-time mother through his first year all distracted her
from writing, she said. The book, 2003's
Acting Out
, begins with the breakup of protagonist Ina's marriage. Until her
husband leaves her for another woman, Ina has lived as a housewife, giving
up her youthful ambitions for upper-class comfort. On her website, Little
shied away (as most authors do) from saying her fiction was
autobiographical, but she said her new book drew from the experiences of
other women living in the suburbs: "I watch, listen to stay-at-home
moms who used to be investment bankers, lawyers, doctors, professors, you
name it, and the frustrations they feel and the mothers who also work
outside the home and the tension between the two groups of mothers,
" she wrote. "I observed
women who seem to have it all, married to men who can provide the kind of
lifestyle where money really isn't a problem and how that can be
its own problem."

Acting Out
questioned bourgeois materialism. "
House Beautiful
homes, shopping as an Olympic sport and social busyness were all
distractions to keep the ennui at bay, to keep conversations with that
real self away, the one who you were before you got hurt, lost first
prize, discovered you didn't have the energy to fight for who you
really wanted to become, " Little wrote in
Acting Out
, as quoted in the
Chicago Tribune.
She told the
Chicago Tribune
's Lehoczky that she thought materialism and consumerism hurt black
people—which surprised the journalist since Little's novels
often describe material trappings. "This rampant materialism is a
real issue for oppressed people, " Little told Lehoczky.
"It's an American problem, and then it's magnified by
people who come out of oppression. I'm not saying there's
anything wrong with [material] things; I'm just saying that you
can't define yourself like that."

That idea struck reviewer Marta Salij of the
Detroit Free Press
as too obvious. Salij was not impressed with
Acting Out
, complaining that Little did not have much new to say about the suburban
lifestyle. In the book, Ina claims she feels stifled and misses her
free-spirited life from the past, but Salij saw little evidence of actual
creative inspiration in Ina. "I think Ina just likes to whine,
" Salij wrote. "I'm not sure Little knows how silly
Ina is. She's written the book in Ina's voice, which
suggests she thinks Ina's insights are profound or at least worth
hearing." Monica Harris of
Essence
, more willing to believe Little was writing out of wisdom, asked Little
why her novels end on bittersweet notes. "In order to have real
insight, we have to be honest, " Little told her.
"Relationships change. They go through cycles and phases; they get
boring. It's a bit unsettling to realize this, but perfection
doesn't exist."

By 2005, when her fourth novel,
Who Does She Think She Is?
, came out, reviewers were still lumping Little in with other black female
writers, though now with a new angle: Little, 46 years old in 2005, was
breaking new ground by describing middle-aged maturity among black
professionals. "Often considered the midwives of black chick lit,
these writers are all baby boomers who paved the way more than a decade
ago for popular fiction featuring a world of black characters, "
wrote Felicia R. Lee of the
New York Times
, referring to Little, McMillan, and novelist Connie Briscoe. "Now
the writers (and many of those characters) have grown up—they got
the man, had the kids, and moved to the suburbs—but they are still
pioneers." Little agreed. "We're really the only
place you're going to see black women of a certain age and a
certain sort of history, " she told Lee.

Who Does She Think She Is?
is told in three voices. The 26-year-old protagonist, Aisha, is caught
between two men, her white fiancé and a dashing black gentleman she
meets at her engagement party. Meanwhile, her mother and grandmother
reexamine their life choices when confronted by Aisha's dilemma.
"Little strikes a nice balance between heart-felt intergenerational
saga and sexy love story, "
Publishers Weekly
wrote. Little explained she mixed the love story with the family story to
explore more serious themes than some of her younger peers. "The
black chick-lit books that I've read, it's all about
'gotta find a man' and that's it, " she told
Lee of the
New York Times.
"These characters just spring up, they don't have a
background, they don't have parents, they don't have
brothers and sisters and concerns." The novel also touched on the
effect that growing up with their fathers absent can have on women, an
issue Little was exposed to while working on articles for
Essence.
"I found out how big the 'daddy hunger' issue is for
black women, " she told Paula L. Woods of the
Los Angeles Times.
"I grew up with my dad in the house, so I took it for granted even
though I knew people in my neighborhoodwho didn't have their dads.
I'd meet or read about all these really together women, at least on
the surface, and their [sense of incompleteness] was generally due to lack
of a daddy presence."

Little told
Essence
writer Kyle Smith that her goal in writing is not to keep covering the
same ground. "Recently a woman asked me, 'Why don't
you write another
Good Hair
?' As a writer, I'm bored with those characters now.
I'd like to change the focus of what I'm doing. I'm
working to that end and writing nonfiction. It may surprise some of my
readers, but I'd like to write about topics like the impact of
poverty on our community. And I hate to sound flip about that because
it's not flip. I do have other stories I need to tell."